What Happened Today: July 26, 2022
Leaders of eccentric nationalist group arrested in Georgia; Pelosi's high stakes Taiwan trip; Blame Generation X
The Big Story
A standoff between a police SWAT team and the leaders of an eccentric Black nationalist communist group known as the Black Hammer Party ended with one man dead and two taken into custody on Wednesday after a person inside the group’s Fayetteville, Georgia, headquarters called 911 to say they had been kidnapped. According to arrest warrants obtained by local media on Friday, the group’s leader Augustus Romain, who went by the name Gazi Kodzo, had directed his “colonel” Xavier Rushin and a member known as AP to force two people by gunpoint into a locked garage “so that [Romain] could commit sodomy.” During the standoff, AP allegedly died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head before Romain was arrested on charges of rape, conspiracy to commit criminal street-gang activity, aggravated assault, and being a party to false imprisonment and kidnapping. Bef0re becoming the Black Hammer Party’s current leader, Kodzo had formerly attempted to gain fame as a YouTube personality called Smiletone who posted videos bantering about fashion.
Self-styled as a revolutionary collective that “exists to take the land back for all colonized people worldwide,” per its own mission statement, the Black Hammer Party has “declared war” against Antifa and Black Lives Matter for not being more aggressive in their activism. They gained wider notoriety last year after posting a video on social media showing them burning a copy of Anne Frank’s diary during a failed attempt to recruit members to a since-abandoned commune in Colorado. In a subsequent viral tweet, the group said, “Anne Frank is literally amerikan [sic] propaganda used to silence colonized people on the harm [white] Jews are doing today to colonized people.” Having raised at least $112,300 for various activism campaigns on the Cash App platform, the Black Hammer Party has begun calling on supporters to donate to the bail fund for its top leaders.
Read More: https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-713055
In the Back Pages: Blame Generation X
The Rest
→ An upcoming visit to Taiwan in August by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is roiling Washington, D.C., as the trip will further strain President Biden’s volatile relationship with China and likely add tension to a forthcoming diplomatic call with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Last week, Biden said top military officials were concerned that Pelosi’s visit was “not a good idea right now,” a veiled reference to China’s increasingly aggressive posture toward the independent self-governed island that China considers a part of its territory. “President Biden should make it abundantly clear to Chairman Xi that there’s not a damn thing the Chinese Communist Party can do about” the speaker’s visit, said Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, one of several prominent Republican officials who have come out in support of Pelosi traveling to the island nation. China has vocally opposed the visit by Pelosi, who has a history of confrontation with Beijing. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said China is “seriously prepared” to retaliate in some form if Pelosi goes to Taiwan, referencing previous official statements that China will carry out “firm and strong measures to safeguard our sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
→ By the time they turn 26, at least 2 out of every 3 U.S. millennials live near where they were raised. That’s according to a new study from the U.S. Census and Harvard University that investigated the extent to which young American adults were reluctant to move far away from home.
All told, at least 80% of millennials who were 26 and older that did move away were still within 100 miles of their hometown area.
Children who grew up in wealthy homes were more likely to move farther away.
White and Asian millennials tended to migrate farther than Black and Hispanic young adults.
White millennials were also most likely to leave home for either Washington, D.C., Denver, Los Angeles, or New York.
Black millennials were most likely to leave home for Atlanta, Houston, and Washington, D.C., though those migrating from wealthy families were several times more likely to end up in one of those cities compared to Black millennials from low-income homes, creating what researchers called a “New Great Migration.”
The new findings supported another recent survey from Pew Research Center that found rising housing costs and student-loan burdens accounted for why roughly 25% of young adults currently lived in a multi-generational family home, more than twice the 9% rate for young adults 50 years prior.
Read More: https://apnews.com/article/census-2020-young-adult-migration-5b7c7f534278cb15cdc699eb132f0a78
→ As college graduates look for plum jobs with their newly minted degrees, they might turn to the booming industry of “enrollment management,” where they can help their alma maters figure out how much financial aid to dangle in front of prospective students. Against the notion that financial aid from schools—which is crucially different from state or federal scholarship programs—exists to help the students most in need, Kevin Carey explains in Slate that this aid in fact aims to charge students a tuition price they will actually pay, much the way a used car dealer will suss up the customer walking in and customize an offer accordingly. With the cost of some private colleges surging past $80,000 per year, schools have a list price for tuition, room, and board—but that price is in fact “an imaginary number,” Carey writes. Students’ financials, which are disclosed on federal aid applications and college applications, are carefully reviewed by the school’s “enrollment management” team before aid packages are offered. These “scholarships” and “grants” do not come “from a pot of actual money” but are rather just couched as such “because that’s what students and parents like to hear.”
Read More: https://slate.com/business/2022/07/college-financial-aid-sham.html
→ QUOTE OF THE DAY:
“Mama don’t want no refrigerator. Mama wants a house.”
Shannon Sharpe, the Hall of Fame tight end who is now an analyst for Fox Sports 1, taking college football coaches to task for criticizing their players’ interest in cutting lucrative licensing deals. With NCAA football now entering its second year of NIL being allowed by the league—that is, with college athletes now enjoying their ability to sell their Name, Image, or Likeness to whomever they damn well please—some coaches who make tens of millions of dollars a year are wondering if there is something inappropriate about their players making a few thousand bucks a month. Kirby Smart, the coach of UGA’s football team who recently inked a $112 million contract, is one of the most outspoken critics of his players’ new NIL income stream. “Is that actually going to make [a college freshman] more successful in life? Because I promise you, if you handed me $10K a month my freshman year of college, I probably wouldn’t be where I am today. I believe that.” Sharpe, however, sees this for what it is: Kirby’s power to attract top players with little “back alley” deals—a fridge for mama—won’t cut it any longer when players can start negotiating with teams for million-dollar NIL deals.
Watch Sharpe’s takedown below:
→ Germany is bracing for energy shortages, with Russia recently announcing that Gazprom’s Nord Stream 1 pipeline will cut its supply of gas to Europe by half. Russia supplied the European Union with 40% of its natural gas last year, and Putin’s weaponization of his energy supply is leaving countries across Europe searching for alternative energy sources. In Germany, Chancellor Olaf Scholz has suggested that the country might reconsider its planned nuclear-plant closures in the hopes of avoiding a crisis. Such a policy change would mark a big concession from Germany’s Green Party, which has long opposed the use of nuclear power. With the looming threat of an energy crisis in the country, however, “all measures will be put back on the table,” said Ricarda Lang, the Green Party co-leader.
→ Three days after voting against the Respect for Marriage Act, which seeks to enshrine protections for same-sex marriage into law, Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-PA) attended his gay son’s wedding. Asked about his attendance at his son’s wedding, Thompson’s press secretary wrote that “Congressman and Mrs. Thompson were thrilled to attend and celebrate their son’s marriage on Friday night as he began this new chapter in his life.” The Respect for Marriage Act did garner 47 Republican votes (with 157 Republicans voting against it) and now moves to the Senate, where at least one Republican, Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, has confirmed that he intends to support the bill. Portman was staunchly opposed to gay marriage until his own son told him he was gay, inspiring a “change of heart,” as Portman put it in a 2013 op-ed in The Columbus Dispatch.
→ NUMBER OF THE DAY: $220
The monthly cost of having an off-duty officer from the Minneapolis Police Department come patrol your neighborhood. A new Minneapolis program, the Minneapolis Safety Initiative, was approved by the city’s officials in January, clearing the way for citizens to band together and pay patrolmen to do the very thing they’re already paying taxes for those patrolmen to do. This program emerges in the wake of the United States’ ongoing debate about its police—a debate largely spawned by the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. Two years later, crime is on the rise nationwide, and police departments are having a hard time keeping or recruiting officers. The Minneapolis Safety Initiative is one way that those who (a) have the means and (b) have positive feelings about the Minneapolis Police Department can make their streets safer. Some, however, feel that a sense of safety should not be a right reserved for those who can afford it. “At the end of the day, everybody wants to feel safe, and safety is a priority for all communities,” said AJ Awed, the executive director of the Cedarside Community Council. “Unfortunately, this policy […] has really pit neighborhoods against each other.”
→ Republican legislators in Indiana’s state senate are discussing a sweeping new abortion ban that would allow abortions for pregnancies that imperil the life of the mother or that are caused by rape or incest, but would otherwise ban all abortions from the time an egg is implanted into a fetus—weeks before a woman would know she is pregnant. Indiana’s current abortion laws were recently at the center of a heated national debate when a 10-year-old rape victim traveled from Ohio, where all abortions are banned after six weeks, to Indiana. The mood around Indiana’s statehouse in Indianapolis was similarly heated, with pro-life and pro-choice protestors standing toe to toe.
→ Coinbase, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, is facing yet another Securities and Exchanges Commission probe, this one to see if the company had sold assets that should have been identified as securities and therefore registered with the SEC; news of this new probe drove Coinbase’s stock down by more than 9% on Monday. Leaked anonymously to Bloomberg by several people familiar with the matter, this latest investigation comes just days after the SEC announced it would be charging numerous former Coinbase employees with insider trading. These moves from the SEC are part of its larger push to oversee the crypto market. SEC Chair Gary Gensler has made his views known that cryptocurrencies should count as securities and be policed by his office—a claim that Coinbase, in a letter published to its site last week, forcefully rejected. The letter’s title: “Coinbase does not list securities. End of story.”
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
TODAY IN TABLET:
Mystery of Noah’s Ark Solved! Tablet columnist Michael Lind writes about how the shape of the ark has been a puzzle for millennia. Until now.
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-mystery-of-noahs-ark
Kaddish, Revised Rebecca Sonkin on how she mourned her dad a decade after blowing off her biggest obligation to him.
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/belief/articles/kaddish-revised-havrutah
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something you want to tell us about that’s going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Blame Generation X
Gen Xers created the world of avocado toast and woke hysteria that they now blame on Millenials.
By Katherine Dee
“They have trouble making decisions. They would rather hike in the Himalayas than climb a corporate ladder. They have few heroes, no anthems, no style to call their own. They crave entertainment, but their attention span is as short as one zap of a TV dial. They hate yuppies, hippies and druggies. They postpone marriage because they dread divorce. … What worries parents, teachers and employers is that the latest crop of adults wants to postpone growing up.” —twentysomething, TIME Magazine, July 6, 1990
This year, I noticed an uptick in the Gen Xers in my life—both online and off—proudly proclaiming their difference. “We were the last good generation,” they all seemed to say.
Just a few months ago, the writer Antonio García Martínez penned an essay titled “Gen X Marks the Spot: On the Trials and Tribulations of the Last Good Generation.” In it, Martínez argues that Gen Xers born between 1965 and 1980 are in a particularly hostile generational situation, sandwiched between two cohorts who frankly suck: the Baby Boomers and millennials.
The piece is premised on the idea that Baby Boomers and millennials are joined in being big, evil cry-bully cancellation hounds—the apex of these purity spirals being their attempt to cancel podcast host Joe Rogan for entertaining controversial topics like alternative theories about COVID-19 on his show. Were Gen X in charge, Martínez postulates, there’d be no Rogan witch hunt. There’d be no witch hunts, period. Gen X was the last to stick it to the man, from his view, the last “to go flying down shoddily built plywood ramps on bikes and skateboards with no helmets on, and we somehow now inhabit a world where the youth are less wild and reckless than we were or are, despite being treated more gingerly than newborns.”
Tell that to all my millennial friends who ended up in the hospital after shot-gunning Four Loko and lived to tell the tale, dude. Kidding aside, I’m not sure that I buy these claims to generational superiority.
I think that almost every trait people hate millennials for is either a Gen X invention or something Gen X significantly popularized.
Millennials might have perfected or updated the tech, but we didn’t pioneer it. It isn’t one or two flukes, either—the list is a mile long.
Off the top of my head: avocado toast and trend-seeking more generally; BuzzFeed, Gawker, and their respective styles of journalism; witchcraft as we know it today; the girl boss; the lax Silicon Valley wunderkind, replete with jeans, hoodie, and “startup campus”; the type of cloying fandom that empowers fully grown adults to pepper their everyday speech with Harry Potter-isms; the theater kid mentality; geek culture and the cultural baggage that comes with it; branding oneself; social media as a product and an ethos; living your life like you’re in a Real World house; and oversharing online, including the type characteristic of Xennial Kim Kardashian.
And do you know which kids were the first to receive participation trophies en masse? You’re never going to believe this. Gen X! Reading Douglas Coupland’s seminal Generation X feels like a case study on millennials, minus Instagram.
We’re not so different after all, Antonio.
Read the rest here.